Model Railroad Blog

Brooklyn Terminal February 2/2/20

After a holiday break it’s back to work on the Brooklyn Terminal. Currently on the docket is fabricating three of the remaining six code 40 turnouts.

The first step is cutting and filing the individual rail pieces. I do this by lightly clamping them in a small hobby vise. There isn’t much material with code 40 rail so the filing goes quickly but the small size makes it a little hard to grip.

Here you can see the finished rail pieces for the three turnouts sitting on the paper sheet. I photocopied some Peco turnouts and glued the paper to a block of wood. Using this as a guide, the next step will be to glue he PC ties to the paper template.

Kicking off 2020

With the holidays and some work travel behind me, it’s time to get back to modeling. The Brooklyn Terminal layout achieved critical mass last year and came together enough that the final vision was more apparent. There are six more hand laid turnouts to be done which will be my main focus in the upcoming year. A close second will be ongoing tuning of the small steam switchers, adding switch machines, and switching over to NCE for the control system. I’m working on my first Kalmbach book which has a deadline of August so that will compete with my modeling time a little.

Detailing the Shoreline

This week I detailed the shoreline. First up was adding the high tide “stain” which was done by carefully masking things off with damp paper towels and lightly airbrushing on Model Master “sand”. Next up I used the same dampened paper towel technique to add static grass at the top of the embankment and between the rails. I wrapped things up by adding debris such as abandoned tires, paper trash, and pieces of wood.